


yeah? write me a new one

by kwritten



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Labyrinth (1986)
Genre: Crossover, Crossover Pairings, F/F, Femslash, Femslash February
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-02-04
Updated: 2015-12-14
Packaged: 2018-03-10 12:03:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,999
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3289667
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kwritten/pseuds/kwritten
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>prompt: we both believed in fairy tales and ended up with horror stories<br/>summary: dawn the RA at a mysterious university gets paired with horror-story-roommate sarah williams and after a "not"-David-Bowie steals their laptops, they find themselves picking their way through dawn's worse nightmare and sarah's favorite fairy tale: the labyrinth. <br/>“What did he take?” <br/>“Well usually he takes my brother…”<br/> “Awesome. What did he take this time?” <br/>“Our laptops.” </p><p>will they get their laptops back in time for finals? will jareth finally claim his bride? will dawn lose more than her favorite pair of earrings?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

“God fucking damnit, Jareth!”

 

  
Dawn knew something was up with her roommate when she finally clambered up the eight flights of stairs to her floor and saw a line of heads peeking curiously out of doorways towards the largest one on the end (stairs because she’s been eating way too many bagels with extra cream cheese for breakfast lately but also mostly because the RA from the tenth floor was already in it making out with her girlfriend and kinda not creepily at all staring at Dawn from over her shoulder and it was either stairs or turning around and leaving for no reason or being propositioned for a threesome  ~~again~~  so … stairs happened) which was Dawn’s room and that shriek she heard was absolutely definitely Sarah’s shriek.   
  
The door leading to the dank stairwell banged shut behind her and everyone’s head flipped back toward her … she stood awkwardly but defiantly meeting their gaze for about three-point-oh seconds before everyone (nearly in unison) scurried back behind their doors and shut them solidly.   
  
Dawn sighed and eyed the hallway leading to her open door warily. She had about an hour before the more curious started raining down complaints or concerned queries on her poor phone that had already seen its last leg today and had been crying at her with tiny chirps for a charge for at least the last three hours. She also needed a nap. And caffeine. Neither of which were going to meet her in the room, unless Sarah had suddenly gotten a personality transplant and turned on the coffee pot perched precariously on top of their mini-fridge.   
  
She probably had been standing there for a while because the door closest to her on the right opened very slowly and mousy little Bea with her dark curls tucked under her hoodie peeked out and stared at her with her owlish eyes.   
  
“Um… Dawn?”  
  
Dawn smiled cheerfully, if a little forced, “Hi Bea! How did your bio midterm go?”  
  
“It’s next week.”  
  
“Oh.”  
  
Dawn chewed on her lip and Bea stared at her shoes.  
  
“Well I think I can squeeze in another study jam this weekend if you want? I’ll even spring for Chinese takeout.”  
  
Bea stared at her wide-eyed and then abruptly shut the door.   
  
“Great,” Dawn muttered. Bea had been one of the hardest freshmen on the floor to crack. For the first month the rest of the RA’s had been taking bets on how soon she would drop out.   
  
Dawn isn’t even sure why the girl had latched on to her – or when – but suddenly she was hosting bio cram sessions in her dorm room for Bea and her equally terrified-looking roommate. (A girl Dawn was 99% positive wasn’t even taking Biology 1A that semester – or had any plans to in the future, but that didn’t stop her from producing color-coded notes and acing Dawn’s practice tests.) She knew that the university paired up new dorm roommates according compatibility suggested by a careful (and bizarrely intrusive) personality test – and it seemed more and more like Bea and little-B (Dawn could never remember her name and somehow she was a good foot shorter than pixie-sized Bea, hence the nickname) were just a little  _too_  similar. She should probably make that an agenda piece at the next RA meeting: “Is there really such a thing as  _too similar_?”  
  
She shifted the bag on her shoulder and sighed. It’s possible that in that thirty second conversation she had lost Bea for good and Patrice on the third floor was going to win the bet on the girl dropping out the week before finals despite the solid pound of Kung Pow Shrimp she’d eaten in the past two months.   
  
Just as she was starting to seriously consider inching her way towards the room and Sarah’s angry expletives, the door opened again and little-B was holding out a mug that said “Edward Sucks” with little vampire teeth dripping with blood hanging off the lip towards her.  
  
“You’re gonna need it,” she whispered.  
  
Dawn reached for it eagerly, praying for coffee. Praying desperately for coffee. “What is it?” she stage-whispered back.  
  
Bea popped her head over her roommate’s, “Liquid courage.”  
  
Both girls raised their tiny fights in the air like boxers. “Dawn fighting!” they whispered, before disappearing into the gloom of their room once again.  
  
It was coffee, she discovered as she charged towards Sarah’s voice with her spine straight, and also a slight hint of butterscotch schnapps. Which she should probably confiscate, but didn’t dare.  
  
She’d probably need them to have it on hand for another emergency in the not-too-distant future.   
  
“You are freaking everyone out. Didn’t we make a pact? No yelling,” Dawn said as she walked (calmly) (ever so calmly) through the door. “Especially at nothing,” she added under breath … and then instantly swallowed.   
  
Because reclining in the window was what looked like a diva version of David Bowie.   
  
And Sarah was currently throwing anything she could get her hands on at him.  
  
Now, coming into your dorm room to find 1980’s David Bowie calmly sitting in your window playing with a large glowy ball thing was enough to make a girl suspicious about the amount of schnapps her young charges had put in her coffee, but when you add in the fact that everything Sarah threw at the very calm … man (?) … disappeared inches from his face (she had good aim for an art major) and reappeared back in its original place well… Dawn was torn between throwing her coffee at him just to see what would happen and calling the school’s psychology department and hoping for some really good drugs.   
  
So she did what any sane sister to a Slayer would do, she closed the door quietly, handed Sarah a stuffed animal from off her bed, sat down and sipped her coffee with her legs crossed primly and just watched for a minute.   
  
When Sarah paused to catch her breath – the never-ending abuse coming from her mouth nearly making Dawn blush – Dawn asked the one question that had been eating at her for the past five or two minutes or so.  
  
“Is that David Bowie in our window?”  
  
“No. That’s… Who is…?”   
  
Dawn lifted up her phone (now plugged into the wall socket behind her and chugging along with google searches quite happily and with no distressed beeping sounds) to her roommate and continued sipping her coffee calmly.  
  
Sarah stared at the image Dawn had pulled up on her phone’s screen and then cocked her head at the one in the window. “ _Are_  you David Bowie?”  
  
“I’ve been told there is a resemblance.” Sarah threw a clock at him.  
  
Dawn snorted, “I knew a guy once who claimed Billy Idol stole his look.”  
  
The not-David-Bowie in the window smiled a Cheshire smile, but didn’t say anything.   
  
Sarah got that blank look that she always gets whenever someone makes a reference to culture past 1870, “Wait… who is Billy Idol?”  
  
“My darling?” not-David Bowie was holding the clock she had thrown at him earlier and was examining it curiously as if he had never seen such a thing in his life. “Are you quite finished throwing things at me?”  
  
“Never,” Sarah responded sullenly. Dawn handed her the almost-empty coffee mug (that was becoming pleasantly more schnapps and less coffee as she went along), which she threw a bit half-heartedly seconds before it reappeared in Dawn’s hand, the coffee now a few degrees warmer than it had been.  
  
“Thanks,” she said, raising her mug in cheers to the not-David-Bowie in the window.   
  
“I am on a time constraint.”  
  
Sarah stamped her foot (Dawn nearly choked on her coffee), “You  _make_  the time constraints. How about we don’t this time?”  
  
The diva shrugged and then dematerialized.   
  
Which was honestly not the weirdest thing Dawn had ever seen, so she didn’t make a big deal out of it.   
  
Sarah eyed her and the ironic mug that was clearly not hers, “What?!”  
  
Dawn blinked.   
  
“Oh right,” Sarah waved her hands towards the window and sat down to pull on a pair of boots with her lacy white … thing she was wearing. (Honestly most days she looked like she was auditioning to play Ophelia in a weird punk version of  _Hamlet_  which was the least strange thing about her. Today’s get up appeared to be a white lace overlay from a 50’s wedding dress pulled over a red bra and black leggings… and now combat boots. It would be hot if Dawn didn’t know just how fucking weird her roommate was.) “That’s just… my ex… kinda? It’s hard to explain.”  
  
“Your ex?”  
  
Sarah nodded, “I know he seems kinda … like … old.”  
  
“Also you’re a lesbian.”  
  
Sarah stared open-mouthed at Dawn. Who blushed furiously and then waved at her surroundings.   
  
She was basically living in a den of 1800’s porn. Black and white etchings and posters and sketches of women in corsets filled every inch of Sarah’s side of the room.  
  
“I’m an  _art major_!!!”  
  
Dawn winced. She had really hoped that the yelling would have stopped. “You’re a philosophy-classical poetry double major.”  
  
“With a  _minor_  in  _ **art**_!”  
  
“Look. I’m sorry. I thought my gaydar had sensed something.”  
  
Sarah snorted, throwing various suspicious supplies into her raggedy bag, “Gaydar? What are you like—”  
  
“Totally gay. Yeah.”  
  
They stared at each other for a moment.  
  
Considering all the naked women on her walls for the past three months – and also finding Sarah curled up (shirtless) with a girl from their philosophy of ancient culture class that one night – and also openly talking about her date with that hot barista with the lip piercing – Dawn was not expecting to need to ‘come out’ to her roommate.  
  
Sarah shuffled awkwardly, “Yeah well. Okay I guess I knew that.”  
  
Dawn rolled her eyes, “You are like the most adorably oblivious human I have ever met.”  
  
And then she washed her hands of the whole affair. Apparently her roommate wasn’t crazy like everyone thought – she just had a somewhat annoying demon ex that popped in once in a while and caused drama.  
  
Whatevs.  
  
It was naptime and he was gone and Sarah seemed capable of handling him on her own so there was no need for phone calls to England or a trip to the Hyperion or a furious few hours of research only to come up empty-handed. Her responsibility on this matter was completely at an impasse.   
  
She had just rolled into the nook under her dorm-issue bedframe onto her dorm-issue mattress and memory-foam pad and was settling in for a nice, warm, quiet nap, when Sarah flipped the blanket over and demanded, “Well are you coming or not?”  
  
“Not.”  
  
“But… you  _have_  to.”  
  
“Not.”  
  
“Please?”  
  
Dawn opened her eyes and squinted, “Is it a place with coffee.”  
  
Sarah nodded her head, “There’s a party, too.”  
  
Dawn stared her down. Which was the easiest thing to do and always yielded results because aside from harboring a potentially secret demon boyfriend, Sarah was alarmingly incapable of keeping secrets or lying.  
  
“Well… okay. There’s like a party  _after_  the maze.”  
  
“Like a corn maze? I don’t like corn mazes.”  
  
“More like… labyrinth?”  
  
“Spit it out Williams, you are disturbing my naptime.”  
  
Sarah whimpered a little, “I just really don’t think you should nap there?”  
  
“Where on my –” not-bed. Dawn was on a not-bed. Actually she was on a giant lily pad in a pond beneath a willow tree. Which was all rather poetic. And precarious.   
  
Dawn scrambled off the lily pad into a mud puddle and after getting momentarily tangled up in willow branches, was free and in the light of day.  
  
Just to be greeted by a giant grey-block wall that went in either direction as far as she could see.  
  
Dawn closed her eyes, “Don’t tell me. Your kinda-ex likes to put you in a labyrinth every few years?”  
  
Sarah nodded. Which Dawn couldn’t strictly  _see_  as she was still standing there with her eyes closed.   
  
“And there’s some sort of timed deadline?”  
  
“Um…”  
  
“What did he take?”  
  
“Well usually he takes my brother…”  
  
“Awesome. What did he take this time?”  
  
“Our laptops.”  
  
“ _Our what?!_ ”  
  
“Yeah…”  
  
“Why am I involved?! My chem midterm is saved on that laptop!”  
  
Sarah shrugged, “I think he likes you?”  
  
Dawn opened her eyes, “Yay me.”  
  
“Anyway – aren’t you like a demon hunter or something? I’ve seen all the stakes and the holy water and stuff.”  
  
“You noticed the holy water but not that I date girls?”  
  
“Hey – you live with a goblin king popping into your life every few months and then tell me what things you notice.”  
  
“My sister is a  _slay- yer_ and I still take time out to check out hot girls when they come my way.”  
  
“You think I’m—”  
  
“So this labyrinth,” Dawn looked up at the wall in front of her. “Is it always the same or does it change?”  
  
“Sometimes it changes while you’re looking at it.”  
  
“So how do we start?”  
  
Sarah looked to her left and then looked to her right, looking baffled and wind-swept and every bit exactly what a fairy creature would want in a bride. All she needed was a crown of daisies. Dawn could see it, suddenly, for the first time – this was  _exactly_  where Sarah belonged. She was made of the earth here, everything about her suddenly made exquisite sense.  
  
She leaned into the wall and almost fell completely over as a secret door opened up behind her.  
  
“Found it!”  
  
Sarah smiled brightly. “Come on feet!” she said cheerily, stepping through the secret door.  
  
“What?!”  
  
“Oh… that’s just how he likes me to start. I didn’t once and he came back a week later with a five hundred stanza-long poem about it,” the wind danced through her hair playfully. “It’s best just to play by the rules.”  
  
They walked in silence for a while, trying not to trip over the elaborate root system that seemed to be constantly moving underfoot. Sarah seemed to gain more energy and more… pep in her step the longer they were there.  
  
“So what’s the endgame?”  
  
“Huh?”  
  
“I mean… why does he keep bringing you back here? What does he want?”  
  
“Oh,” Sarah’s laugh back in their dorm was childish, half-hearted, but here it twinkled like stars on a hidden forest brook. (Dawn took a half-second to  _wtf?!_  her own brain before just deciding to let it go.) “He wants to marry me.”  
  
“Been there,” Dawn muttered.  
  
“Really?” it was like being asked a question by a queen of fae herself.   
  
“Yeah… this. Dancing demon guy. Accidentally got summoned, I had his necklace, yadda yadda. No wedding yeay.”  
  
“I wonder if he knows my Jareth.”  
  
Dawn stumbled over a tree root and Sarah smiled good-naturedly. Suddenly everything that had once been sullen and cross about her seemed good-natured. Also as suddenly Dawn’s inner monologue was taking a twist towards the poesy and she didn’t quite know what to make of that, being a prosy sort of down-to-earth person herself.  
  
“You’re lucky you had shoes on. Once I came without shoes and it was a struggle.”  
  
“What did you do?”  
  
“Got to the center of the Labyrinth and took my shoes back, of course.”  
  
Dawn stood silently in the middle of a labyrinth and mulled over that sentence for a while.  
  
Oh yeah.   
  
She was in trouble.  
  
(Was it her heart waiting for her at the center of the labyrinth? Or was it walking beside her in a ridiculous white lacey get-up and combat boots?)


	2. being a prologue - or, a catalogue of events that got dawn to this moment in time

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> originally published on lj @2/11/15

Dawn didn’t insist on paying for college on her own – per say – but she did do the community college third-year transfer route and applied for all the scholarships that she could find. 

(Andrew once asked her if _that_ wasn’t the unfair thing, throwing around her centuries-old brain like it was just a normal eighteen-year-old’s in with the other scholarship kids, and not the taking-tainted-Council-money… which she wasn’t exactly _above_ doing to cover the rest of the costs of living. She responded by kicking him in the shins and ignoring him for a couple of hours.)

 

It was mostly Buffy’s idea – which was hammered home by Faith over a too-cheap bottle or two of wine and then again the morning after with all her stomach finding its way into the bucket that somehow just _existed_ though Dawn is not sure where or how previously to that moment when it appeared in front of her along with a mug of coffee. 

“She wants you to have some kind of normalcy.”

“So she wants me to struggle?”

Faith shrugged, “That’s life, isn’t it? So you have to take a different route than you thought, maybe you’ll learn more this way.” Dawn raised her eyebrows over the glass of extra-spicy Bloody Mary. “I don’t know anything about college… but I know that if you take the easy way, you’ll turn into Giles – all stuffed shirt and Watcher material muttering in Ancient Babadook to yourself and making jokes no one laughs at.”

“No one laughs at my jokes anyway.”

“Do this the way Buffy wants. Give her this.”

“And what do I get?”

Faith considered for a minute, taking a long swallow of coffee, “Jokes that people actually understand?”

“I can always do the Oxford thing later.”

“It’s not like you don’t have the time.”

 

So she found a [small community college in Utah](http://www.snow.edu/) to do her first two years in (it came highly recommended and it was worlds away from anyone or anything that she ever knew). The supernatural world left her alone (for the most part) only really intruding when she really, really didn’t have time for it to. 

She found a job at the local library in the tutoring center for kids and also helping out at an animal shelter on the weekends. She became one of those crunchy, liberal sort of college students with piercing or two and high-minded ideals, two jobs, absent parents, and a second-hand mattress on a dirty carpet in an apartment with four other people. She went to rallies and she went to parties and she rubbed elbows with humans like she was one. She was in a band for a while, but didn’t have any musical talent so she backed out gracefully. 

When her two years in isolation were up, Buffy shyly suggested that she take up residence in the Council’s Department at Oxford – they practically had a private office set up and waiting for her.

She went to school under a pseudonym and meanwhile kept publishing articles and doing translation work for the Slayers and the Council as an ‘independent scholar’ – just like any normal girl her age.

But Dawn finally had seen what it was that Buffy had wanted her to learn – and wasn’t ready to go back to the blood and the death and the mayhem.

 

“I can always do Oxford later. It’s not like I don’t have time.”

“I know that. I just miss you.”

“I miss you… but I gotta do this.”

“Well… please come to London for Christmas this year at least.”

“I will.”

 

She chose a tiny English program in a small state in a tiny town where nothing remotely interesting ever happens (she checked) (thoroughly). The perky guidance counselor found her a job at the library through work study and kept pushing the idea of becoming an RA and living in the dorms to save money. Dawn finally relented with an eye roll and a shrug, how hard could it be?

The first week, not really actually. Easy as pie. A few too many meetings with ridiculous names and she could live without the overwhelming sense of responsibility that seemed to be hanging over her head at all times… but it wasn’t really all that different from living in a Slayerette Central. Maybe less kickboxing and a lot more coffee and ice cream, but she only had two years left before she was back in the land of bruises and midnight donut runs so this actually felt 

And then she was called down to the guidance office to discuss her future at the university, which was cryptic and weird and not a little terrifying. The perky counselor and a team of suits stared at her and asked her a bunch of really strange questions that didn’t at all seem related to her ability to govern a floor of 10-12 eighteen year old girls.

 

“Jerry, what is this all about? I’ve been here for over an hour and these questions are starting to get a little creepy. Like does it really matter what kind of shampoo I use? And whether I eat bread?”

“We just…”

“Just tell me.”

“There’s this girl.”

“Yeah? Okay. That makes everything crystal clear.”

“She’s been kicked out of four different universities in the last two years for… odd behavior.”

Dawn raised her eyebrows, “You have got to be kidding me.”

“We just want her to … you know… _stay_. Take her finals, pass her classes. And her parents—”

“Wealthy parents.”

“Her parents are very important alumni to this institution and they just want their daughter to have a good college experience. So we thought… if she had a—”

“Babysitter.”

“ _Roommate_ affiliated with the university in an official capacity and therefore under contract to not divulge personal student information—”

“Yeah, yeah. I get it. What is it with this girl? Drugs? Like what kind of weird are we talking here?”

“Well – here’s her file,” Jerry threw a thick file on the desk. “It’s a mess. I can’t make heads or tails of it. She seems to literally _disappear_ for weeks at a time and then reappear rather the worse for wear, a bit malnourished and a little off.”

“She bit her last psychiatrist.”

“She’s feisty.”

“She was nineteen at the time.”

“Now, Dawn.”

“I’ll do it.”

“Really?!” Jerry slumped down in her chair. “Thank the _gods_.”

“It’s no big. Nothing is weirder than me. Trust me.”

 

There were a lot of things weirder than Dawn Summers. 

Niaflathorn Demons, for instance. Those things are fucking weird. Like if an Ent and a penguin had a love child and covered it in bees. 

Sarah Williams was definitely somewhere between a Dawn and a Niaflathorn demon. Which was pretty par on course for Dawn’s life prior to this whole college-thing she was trying.

However, in all her time away from home (and counting years of Buffy’s _slob_ ), Sarah was without a doubt the absolute _worst_ roommate in the history of roommates. 

And once Dawn had bunked with a mime.

She had least had done the dishes when asked. If a little melodramatic about the whole thing. 

Nothing – absolutely nothing – compared to Sarah Williams.

 

Tromping through a labyrinth, Dawn wished she could go back to Jerry’s office and laugh at that thick file, request a Niaflathorn demon for a roommate instead. Or a mime. Or a fucking Slayerette if what they wanted was to torture her. At least then she’d be prepared for an inter-dimensional crisis. 

This spur-of-the-moment “oh yeah my ex is a demon king” thing was seriously a pain in the ass and Dawn didn’t want any part of it.

 

Sarah turned and smiled, “Look! Jasmine!”

Dawn watched her roommate construct two flower crowns with what seemed like a simple flick of her wrist and then very grudgingly let Sarah crown her.

“You have such a delightfully fae-look about you,” Sarah beamed at her, admiring the handiwork of her crown perched haphazardly on Dawn’s head.

“Just what I have always longed to hear,” Dawn said grumpily, kicking a loose rock at her feet.

“Oh,” Sarah twirled a bit, her arms and hair swinging about her. “Oh silly. Every little girl dreams of being a fairy princess at least once.”

“Little girl being the operative word,” Dawn mumbled under her breath before marching on.

 

(Yeah, she may have had the college-life like Buffy wanted, but what of that lost childhood gone up in flames with a dozen fabricated diaries?)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> note: Dawn's junior college ([Snow College](http://www.utah.com/images/lf/panoUNIVERSITY.jpg)) is a real place and is the 2-year college my grandmother _desperately_ wanted me to attend. She had always wanted to go there and she instilled in me this ~need to experience it. Now, Dawn's experience of this campus is probably more liberal and wild than my grandmother would ever have intended for me, but it is a perfect location and it's just the kind of small-town community college I could see Dawn choosing as a personal walkabout location. 
> 
> I would like to imagine that Dawn and Sarah are at [Silas University](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4QzRfvkJZ4), but canon says that it is in Austria and I'd very much like to keep this in the US. Therefore, imagine that instead Dawn and Sarah are in a University close to - but not actually in - [Night Vale](http://commonplacebooks.com/) or somewhere similar. Something ~supernatural but not quite on the level of a Hellmouth and more like the ~weird of Silas or Night Vale. If that makes logic sense?


End file.
